Charles Prince’s departure from Citigroup seemed like a very long time coming. The chief executive of the world’s largest bank presided over one calamity after another in the run-up to his demise.

Then on Thursday, Meredith Whitney, the CIBC analyst, sent Citigroup’s shares down by nearly 7 per cent when she suggested that the bank needed to raise more than $30 billion (£14.4 billion) to restore its capital cushion. If that wasn’t bad enough, she also suggested that Citigroup would need to cut its dividend or sell assets, which would hamper future profit growth.

But calls for Mr Prince’s resignation had been coming thick and fast for over a year, as investors grew increasingly frustrated about the group’s bloated cost base, flagging profits and, most of all, its flat share price.

Unacceptable as it was, it is a sign of just how frustrated Citigroup shareholders have become under Mr Prince’s tenure that Ms Whitney received a number of death threats from the bank’s investors on Friday after her note took a further chunk out of the group’s credibility. The resulting share price decline left the stock 31 per cent down for the year.

Ms Whitney’s note came hard on the heels of three further developments which collectively sealed Mr Prince’s fate. The first was the announcement of a $6.5 billion third-quarter writedown last month, much of it relating to mortgages and buyout loans, which signalled that Citigroup’s exposure to the credit crunch was much higher than previously anticipated.

In the second, analysts began predicting last week that Citigroup could easily have to write down the value of its investments in mortgage-backed securities by a further $5 billion this quarter.

Third, Stan O’Neal, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who presided over similar sub-prime woes at his firm, resigned this week. This indicated that chief executives could no longer hide behind the redundancies of junior colleagues, but, as the heads of their firms, they must be held accountable.

But Mr Prince’s position was far from assured well before the full extent of the sub-prime problem was known, prompting him to say at the start of October that 2007 would be “the year of no excuses”.

Before the sub-prime crisis came along, the fundamental problem stemmed from its mission to become a financial services supermarket, bringing together consumer banking and investment banking under one umbrella. The idea was to provide multiple services to the same clients and build a massive balance sheet that would help it to weather market jolts such as the credit crunch. Instead, the group allowed its costs to run out of control, leaving its profits and share price broadly flat during Mr Prince’s four-year tenure.

While Sanford Weill, Mr Prince’s predecessor, was the principal architect of the Citigroup financial conglomerate, Mr Prince, who started his career as an attorney with US Steel Corp in 1975, was Mr Weill’s faithful lieutenant, standing by his side virtually every step of the way. The two first crossed paths in 1986 when Mr Weill took over Commercial Credit Company, an obscure finance company where Mr Prince worked at the time.

Mr Prince’s legal knowledge proved invaluable in helping to navigate the highly complex bank regulations and his sharp elbows and work ethic made him a tough and tireless negotiator.

But Mr Prince, who took over in 2003, never really had the respect of Wall Street because he had spent much of his time at Citigroup working as a lawyer, rather than directly managing the bank’s operations. He also had an austere, lawyerly manner, which made it harder for him to articulate his case to Wall Street.

Mr Prince has also had his fair share of bad luck. He took over the reins in 2003 just as Citigroup got caught up in costly litigation related to its role in financing Enron and WorldCom.

A scandal in Japan resulted in Citigroup’s private banking unit losing its licences there, while in 2005 US federal regulators barred the bank from making major acquisitions – a ban that has now been lifted.

The group has also lost several senior executives. Most embarrassing among these for the firm was the case of Todd Thomson, the head of the bank’s wealth management unit. Mr Thomson was forced out earlier this year after it emerged that he had used Citigroup’s corporate jet to ferry around Maria Bartiromo, a presenter for the CNBC financial television news channel.

One way and another, it is not a huge surprise that Mr Prince is finally on his way out of Citigroup.

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